


Never Thought Twice

by Etnoe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bittersweet, Dialogue Heavy, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 01:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7914808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etnoe/pseuds/Etnoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Grand Highblood is too important to listen to much of anybody, these days. As irony or serendipity or some other force in the universe would have it, when the Helmsman breaks down, he finds that it's someone unimportant that finally makes him listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Thought Twice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biifurcatedCoder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biifurcatedCoder/gifts).



It was quiet and a riot all at once, on the Condesce's ship. The Grand Highblood found it surpassing strange to be on the flagship while there was hardly a soul aboard, when he was used to it being crammed with little shits ready to go hells of high when he said 'jump', but despite that, peaceful it sure wasn't. The Helmsman's voice packed all the space full: vibrating through the metal that made the ship, hissing on the intercom, putting 1s and 0s on every screen aboard.

"Skeleton staff for a ghost ship: that has the sound of a fortuitous sign, fucking right it does. Or it might just be that I like the sound of it, cracking into place like haunted bones. Best way for bones to be - that way I still get a scream out of them, even should the marrow have dried out an age ago.

"Haha, yeah, there she stomps off," the Grand Highblood said, watching the attendant the Condesce had assigned to him throw her hands up, giving up on getting him to pay any attention. Well sure, she'd been chirping at him for some time, like, since he'd set foot aboard the flagship, but that mattered not a jot if he didn't feel like it should.

" _My lady_! Think you're too sick of me to feel fear? What the fuck have you really seen, as yet - only all this what the ship himself has shown you? That's nothing if you know what I could show you."

He felt the way she was resigned to the nightmares before the chucklevoodoos hit her mind, heh - that never did help.

"Aw, these violetbloods, thinking they can dodge the full force of a scream 'cause they're so used to the lowblood powers bouncing off their thick pans - but my lady, Grand Highblood is not a thing they call a troll just 'cause he's got cute dimples when he smiles. But why should I be talking to a piece of stupid shit bleeding from the ears all the way back down that passage there...

"There's a howling lunatic right here all around me, wherever I might walk. Helmsman! ψiioniic, as they said, back when they still bled on Alternian soil instead of up here among the stars. Do you _HEAR_ this? I got to put your broke-ass mind back together! Condesce went and set me to the last job anybody but a seer might have expected!

"And yet. Here's mother fucking me, going forth to work the might of my will."

The Grand Highblood had found a narrow enough passage that he could put his arms out to touch both sides of it and let his chucklevoodoos search for some manner of proper cognition, in among all the moaning that travelled through the ship - for the thoughts fled from the brain they were supposed to be in, and mixing disastrously with the regular functioning of the ship.

Against both palms the walls vibrated: the accumulations of sound the Helmsman pumped out of his voice box and gleaned from the workings of his engines, and added on top for flavour, even recorded voices of passengers he had carried. The Condesce had told the Grand Highblood that the mass of noise made no sense, and though he didn't have the patience to figure it out himself and see if she was right, he did think that most of all it sounded like...

"Some _fucking whining_ that you got going on here, tin can man. If you were gonna go crazy, why wait one hundred thousand and _more_ of your own lifetimes for it? I can see her kiss you, when I stretch my chucklevoodoos out like this. Feel that shred of your mind flowing electric through this whole ship. When every sensor on you tuned to the new length of lifetime she would bestow on you with a touch of her lips, looking forward to it, fucking hating it...

"The fact that I gotta see it is A MOTHER FUCKING JOKE. That the Condesce herself wants to have a toy like you put back together! By _ME_! Take your fucking memory BACK, you so burdened by it all these millennia. A few more won't be allowed to kill you."

He felt the mad fleck of memory slip along with his guidance, and he shot it right into the busiest pan aboard. He heard the Helmsman gasp, the sound coming over speakers above the Highblood's head.

"And here's another memory! You look to the stars with such fucking love, Helmsman. Gonna give up all that brightness to stare blind at panic? Gonna suck your own circuits and get tangled up in them, instead of charting yourself best courses through the fullness of the universe's sweetest surprises? By gods, _me myself_ could find a love for the things I can see you have once seen...

"Ahh, here you go, goldblood, you musta missed this one like a motherfucker. The Sufferer himself, who held you dear as his pet slave to parade in front of unenlightened ones. You loved him so sweet for it, ain't that right? You want this one back--"

And the Helmsman wailed so heartfelt as that one struck, that even the Highblood paused to let the sound's nuance sink in.

"EAT! You remember that, yeah, here's how eating felt, you remember how it used to be when you thought it was natural--no tubes, no wires, but proper substance to bite into. Gods above, you forgot that simple thing, Helmsman--

"So many things you forgot, so many things you shunted down deep in your head, and now you're letting it leak out into everyone walking through. Forgot how your words work best, didn't you? Forgot how there's any kind of thing you might want to say to our Empress, but she loves her some entertainment. You know that, Helmsman. Gonna have to have you speaking to her again, she won't have it any other way, you're gonna give her all that foul shit-talking she don't hardly get enough of in all her empire, and that's happening NOW."

The Highblood shoved willpower and coherence back into the brain at the centre of the ship. And it was a smart one, the Helmsman was a genius still and more so than any purely alive, un-augmented troll was, so that he took it all right back into himself where it belonged and took back even more than that. Instead of the tragedy that had suffused the ship, he took back enough of himself to be furious.

_LIIISTEN LIISTEN YOU SHIIIT LIIISTEN_

" _TO WHAT?"_ To the furniture getting twitchy?"

But the words did dry up in the Highblood. The last answer - this was the last piece of usable puzzle in the question of how to put the Helmsman back together. He'd just listen to what the Helmsman had to impress on him, see what he could shove out of the ship's general areas and back into the Helmsman's brain, and then he'd be done here.

He'd just...

Get his knowledge on to taking in every endless aeon that the Helmsman had hung where he had been placed. Every stupid itch he hadn't got to scratch, till he built even more stupid little robots to do the job. All the battles he'd sailed into, and half the time had ended. The battles he'd begun. The other ships he'd sung to - and ha-fucking-ha, the kind of shit they said to each other! ... The supernovas ... the _software upgrades_ ... the alien civilisations, and all the odd, gorgeous, stunningly new and comfortingly familiar things picked up on their electronic chatter. The times when he wondered if he'd found the edge, and then when he'd finally gone over it and lost...

He'd lost more of everything in existence than any other troll ever had. Of this, the Grand Highblood was sure. It could actually be called understandable he'd cracked under it for a while.

The ship went silent of both the senselessness that the Helsman had poured out for perigees, and of the viciously coherent flood of thoughts and feelings the Helsman had flooded into the Highblood's pan.

Last time the Highblood had felt the urge to verbally defend himself, he must have been in mere double-digit sweeps. Now he'd been left raw, and he dropped his hands from the walls and found himself nearly petulant as he protested, "Hey, now. I put you together."

The speakers above gave feedback whines at the volume of the reply: "I did the same for you, jackass, and holy shiiit, it's hard to believe anything put a dent in that ego big enough that you could realise you're not the greatest thing out there. And here I'm the one that did it! Wanna come down the CPU slum and hold my fucking hand for it?"

The Grand Highblood began walking.

Well, yeah. Yeah, maybe he would.

The Helmsman had edged out those words on a panicked rage, but he was silent now and let the Highblood walk with nothing more to bother him. Cameras turned visibly and audibly to track him as he made his way through the corridors.

The ship's CPU was clearly marked - like, real fucking clear, with the Condesce's tell-tale pink shag carpeting to show the way. Not a hardship of a path to follow, and the door at the end of it opened as soon as he reached it.

"This is getting weird," the Helmsman said. His mouth moved, and then his head, as he remembered that he could see with eyes as well as cameras and sensors.

The Grand Highblood stepped in, ignoring the jewel-outlined footsteps that made another shiny little path right up to the Helmsman. "Uh-huh."

"That response makes the weirdness worse. You know that I have it on historical record that, while awake, you haven't shut up more than fifteen minutes running for the past seventy sweeps?"

And the Grand Highblood did feel off-balance for it; but he shrugged, and felt a little restored. He _still_ didn't have to give a shit about stuff he didn't want to. "There's a lot you see that I never have. That I never thought about. It's some big shit to consider. Gotta let the puzzle sponge have a chance to digest all that."

"NO FUCKING KIDDING, BRO. How'd you think it would be, keeping a whole consciousness in a space ship? You don't think that's going to cause a change or two? Twenty-two!" His voice trembled, a small sign of how fractured he'd been but moments ago. But then he sneered, higgledy-piggledy and respectably sharp teeth bared with the curl of his lip. "What's your view of eternity like? What does some little thing like _you_ see when you look ahead?"

Contempt, by gods, he dared to show every shred of it that he had left in him. And, alongside that, there was a smile in his voice and at the corners of his mouth and the wrinkles round his eyes, and the Highblood told him, "As the holy writ I follow would have it ... I see plenty of motherfuckers laughing for next to no reason."

Turned out that the Helmsman had a sense of humour left, and at last the Highblood got close, and reached out to touch his shoulder as it moved with laughter.

You had to love it.

*

And when, after a few more perigees, the Highblood left the flagship to go and do his normal duties, there was a babble of pain from the Helmsman that dignity never even had the chance to come near. His own dignity flipped right over on hearing it, belly-bared and begging, so that there was nothing for it but for him to bar the doors of his room and talk back, when the Helmsman let him get in an edgewise word.

"I have to go. Wouldn't be me if I stayed - here under her thumb. You wouldn't be you if she hadn't made you this," he said at last, hands held out in supplication to the camera in the corner of his shipboard reception area. He wished there was some proper part of the Helmsman he could get a hold on to. "Would not be a lick of good to each other, if we weren't as we are right now."

"BullSHIT and I am downloading a programme onto your damn pocket calculator right now—am I sending you specs for a new palm-husktop, by the way, FUCKING RIGHT I AM, how are you walking around with that old piece of shit anyway?

"You'll be able to talk to me, if you use this chat programme. For a good few trillion light years, too, 'cause this is me we're talking about, here, of course it's going to get great coverage." The Helmsman's voice broke up some. "There's hardly going to be a few perigees' delay between messages getting exchanged, too.

"So listen out for me, you grand asshole."

And the Highblood said not a word. He put his palm-husk to the rise and fall of his chest, to make a promise with the repetition of every breath he took. He'd listen out.


End file.
